London, England - The pressures of modern life are eroding the time and space children need to develop, the Archbishop of Canterbury said yesterday as he warned that adults who refused to grow up could become "abusers" of children by default.
Dr Rowan Williams said children were bombarded with inappropriate advertising, forced to sit too many tests at school and were being damaged by infantile adults.
"Childhood is most positively valued and fostered when we resist infantilism," he said. "When adults stop being infants, children can be children."
Unless parents faced the demands of being grown up, the needs of their children would not be met, he said.
"We can become abusers of our children by default when we ignore the choices we can make that will better secure their stability and their sense of being seen and being listened to.
"If we want to give children a chance of experiencing childhood as they should - experiencing it as a time to learn, play, grow, in an environment of stability and security - we have to face the demands of being adults ourselves."
He painted a picture of a society that lacked maturity, in which victim status was "obsessively romanticised", people were addicted to novelty, and "apathy and cynicism" were the standard reactions to issues of public concern.
He criticised the bombardment of children with what he described as unjust pressure from advertisements. "What is a proper regime of regulation for advertising aimed at children? "
In his lecture in east London to the Citizen Organising Foundation, a national body that supports community endeavours, Dr Williams said the relentless emphasis on improving economic productivity has had a damaging impact on education, with a greater focus on school tests.
"It [testing] is another form of our obsession with results and productivity," he said.
Dr Williams said schools should emphasise communication skills and "emotional literacy", as well as reading and writing.
Child care must be about parents and carers creating a stable environment for children, rather than just somewhere to leave children while they go to work, he said.
The belief that all adults should be contributing to the economy "will not solve society's problems".
Dr Williams said that our environment was characterised by intense boredom, secularism, emotional indulgence and a denial of human limitations.
"We want to see a society which is composed of adults, people who can choose and act and change, who can hope, see that they have made a difference, who can be sorry when they fail, who can empathise. It doesn't happen by accident," he said.
"We have choices. We have choices in this election period and we have much longer-term choices as well.
"If we go on producing grown-up infants we can hardly wonder why different sorts of violence and dysfunction exist in our society."
Dr Williams said we lived in a "debased environment" of gossip, inflated rhetoric, non-participation, celebrity obsession and vacuous aspiration.
"It is not surprising that we have a challenge in the area of formation, human formation," he said.